I bet Linden Lab is dealing with a deluge of suggestions through the new submission system right now. It’s like popping the cork from a bottle of a good Spumante wine. Second Life residents have been suggesting improvements for years without much of a sign from Linden Lab that they ever listened. This change is a much appreciated one and a further confirmation that Ebbe Altberg is committed to improving the communication between the company and its users. Kudos to Ebbe and all those Lindens who pushed for this change internally. My only remark is that I wish Linden Lab considered creating a submission system like uservoice.com, where people can vote and comment.

So, after a first suggestion for web-enabled groups, here are some more. As managers of a federation of groups as the East River Community we have a good experience in dealing with issues such as group rights, users and land management. From this experience we submit a list of improvements we wish we had so to facilitate the chore of managing an articulated community such as ours.

Please, let me edit the group name.

Allow owners to kill a group.

Add a note field for each group member. There is a need to add some information about group members.

Improve the interface of the group box. Why do we need to work with such small boxes?

Increase the number of group roles.

Increase the length of the role tag.

Allow a group manager to ban a user over all land owned by a group. Currently if a group owns a vast amount of land on Mainland split in many parcels, a banned user must be added to the ban list of each parcel. When a group owns tens or even hundreds of parcels this is a management nightmare.

Allow land management rights to more than one group. Say, a role-play community may have more than one group associated to it (a group for residents, one for managers, one for security) and all these groups need some rights over the community land. As it is today all these different actors must be added to the group owning the land and this is a real problem with the limited number of group roles we have. What I suggest is to have a more fine-grained system so that I can grant a subset of rights to additional groups over the main group’s land.

Allow to issue land rights by parcel to a user. A fairly common case for communities and estates is the need to issue rights to residents on a single parcel. In the case of our community, sometimes we give banning rights to trusted residents who rent houses in the community. However, we would prefer to issue this right only for a single parcel rather than the whole community land. The same applies to rights such as changing media streams, parcel descriptions, etc.

What is your experience with group and land management? Do you have more suggestions?